suffused by a metrical space made up out of an army of things which provide new
perceptual capacities. In a sense, all are joined together in the domain of bare life
in a reworking of the verification of anticipations made possible by an informed
materiality.
In other words, we are moving into a new ‘a-whereness’, one in which what was
called ‘technology’ has moved so decisively into the interstices of the active per-
cipience of everyday life that it is possible to talk about a new layer of intelligence
abroad in the world, a layer of intelligence which is beginning to unite living things
by virtue of giving them a boosted bare life (Agamben 1998; Thrift 2003b) held
more and more in common. Here we have, in other words, a biodigital politics in
which ‘the body is no longer determined by individual qualities constituting the
difference between animal, human and machine’ (Parisi 200 4 : 13 7 ).
I want to end this section by addressing the issue of bare life in rather more detail.
As originally conceived, bare or simple life was, in effect, intended to describe what
might be conceived of as an ‘animal’ level of consciousness, the simple fact of
‘natural’ living common to all living beings, that minimal level of consciousness
at which life can still be maintained and experienced without cognitive conscious-
ness (and therefore political voice). Now, of course, we know that bare life is in
fact full to overflowing. It consists of the vast amounts of computation done by
living things in order to simply keep functioning. In human beings, think only
of two examples. One is the computation that is necessary to sustain the ‘simple’
fact of bipedal locomotion. In fact the embodied skills of footwork take up a very
large amount of the body’s computational attention – and, of course, vary in
style substantially from culture to culture (Ingold 200 4 ; Amato 200 4 ; Vogel
2001). Another example is the aforementioned content of interactional intelli-
gence. Much of the computation associated with this intelligence is done in just
a few milliseconds and nearly all of it turns up before consciousness, even in human
beings. Thus:
most of what happens in what we call communication or relating happens too
quickly, demands too immediate a response, to have an actual correspondence
with any of the descriptions that might be made of its ‘meaning’. The meaning
of the expression or relational act, it is generally assumed, happened earlier as
‘intention’ or will be recovered later as ‘memory’. But of course the ‘earlier’
and ‘later’ moments of resolution or synthesis are subject to the same condi-
tions of prospective or retrospective postponement as the original expression
or act, as memory and intentionality are themselves but differential ‘takes’ on
the same description.
(Wagner 2001: 8)So, we now know that what we call ‘thinking’ in human beings does not occur
just in the brain but at a series of sites in the body. We also know that bare life
does not just consist of slavish autonomic responses, of blind and unconscious
‘vegetative’ functions. In both animals and human beings what we see are all kinds
of ‘unrememberable but unforgettable’ (Watt, cited in Gerhardt 200 4 : 15) cultural
166 Part III